Washington Decoded

Bundy on Bundy: JFK’s National Security Adviser Listens to the Cuban Missile Crisis Recordings

 

 

 

By Sheldon M. Stern

 

    In the nearly three decades since the declassification of the secret recordings of the Cuban missile crisis ExComm meetings, I have often been asked if the recordings add anything vital to our grasp of that singular event. The answer is irrefutable: yes!

    That question also led me to wonder whether any of the key ExComm participants ultimately learned anything from the recordings. The tapes were not declassified until 1996 and by then most ExComm survivors were quite elderly. However, years earlier, McGeorge Bundy, President Kennedy’s special assistant for national security, received clearance from the National Archives to listen to still-classified tapes from the first day (Tuesday, 16 October 1962) and also from the pivotal last day (Saturday, 27 October 1962).

    One afternoon in the 1980s I was surprised to see Bundy, then in his sixties, preparing to eat a meal in the Kennedy Library staff lunchroom. I introduced myself as the JFK Library historian, and explained that I had previously listened to the missile crisis tapes all the way through to the November lifting of the naval quarantine. Bundy looked incredulous at first, but after I alluded briefly to my background (Harvard PhD) he seemed more interested and at ease. Eventually, he acknowledged that he having difficulty identifying some speakers and I offered to help. Bundy had, of course, worked with these ExComm members and it almost seemed presumptuous for me to tell him who was talking. I explained, however, that when a speaker did not have a distinctive or familiar voice, I had compared it to other tape recordings on which the speakers were clearly identified, enabling me to recognize the voices of Paul Nitze, Roswell Gilpatric, John J. McCloy, U. Alexis Johnson, and several others. If the Boston twang of the Kennedy brothers occasionally made them difficult to distinguish, I was usually able to examine the context of the discussion to determine whether the president or attorney general was speaking.

    Bundy and I spent six absorbing hours in the classified national security vault listening to the October 27th tapes. He had been, the recordings proved, a consistently tough and outspoken critic of the president’s views—which was, of course, his job as White House national security adviser. He knew that JFK did not wish to be surrounded by sycophants. Bundy was also the only participant who openly questioned the president’s judgment and decisions by frequently using the personal pronoun “I” to explain what “I myself would do” in this situation—leading the president to respond impatiently, “I want everybody to understand it, Mac, if you don’t mind.”[1]

    “There may be an advantage,” Bundy suggested in his memoir, “in combining in one account what I know as a participant and what I have since learned from the work of others and from my own study.” These formerly top-secret recordings thoroughly document Bundy’s distinctive role during the ominous October 27th meetings—revised and corrected by the startling new evidence on these scratchy, low fidelity, but irreplaceable and indispensable recordings.[2]

    The most widely-read book about the crisis has been Robert F. Kennedy’s Thirteen Days. It has never been out of print; created the interpretive paradigm for the crisis; and inspired several documentaries and two Hollywood films. Yet many of its key conclusions have been exposed as flatly untrue by the tapes. RFK appears to have chosen to settle personal scores with argumentative participants like Bundy—accusing him “of strange flip-flops . . . . First, he was for a [missile] strike, then a blockade and then for doing nothing . . . because it would upset the situation in Berlin, and then, finally, he led the group which was in favor of an air strike . . . without prior notification, along the lines of Pearl Harbor.” He also claimed that Bundy “had been irresolute or weak-willed.”[3]

    The decisive moment of the crisis arrived on Friday evening, October 26, when Khrushchev sent a lengthy, emotional message to Washington. He insisted that the missiles in Cuba were defensive and proposed removing them in exchange for a US pledge not to invade the island. The next morning the ExComm was stunned to learn about an entirely new offer, made publicly on Moscow Radio, to remove the Cuban missiles if the US removed its Jupiter missiles from Turkey. The president immediately asked what negotiations had taken place with the Turks, noting that he had been considering such a move since the first day of the crisis. Bundy urged JFK not to soften his resolve and asserted that “I would stick to the terms in the Friday letter.” The president insisted that world opinion would back the trade—because “it will look like a very fair trade . . . . you’re going to find a lot of people thinking this is a rather reasonable position.” “That’s true,” Bundy conceded, but “privately we say to Khrushchev: ‘Look, your statement is very dangerous . . . You’d better get straightened out . . . . The current threat to peace is not in Turkey—it is in Cuba.’ JFK countered, “They’ve got a God[damn] . . . they’ve got a very good proposal, which is the reason they’ve made it public.”

    Bundy soon reported that he had contacted the US ambassadors to France and NATO “who confirmed that the “knockdown of the Cuba-Turkey link” had been well-received by the allies. No such inquiry had been explicitly authorized by the president at the ExComm meetings, yet JFK did not comment on or make an issue of Bundy’s potential brush with insubordination.

    “It’s one thing to stand them down,” Bundy repeated, “to reduce the likelihood of a Soviet attack on Turkey . . . . It’s quite another thing to trade them out.” But Kennedy countered again that “most people will regard this as not an unreasonable proposal, I’ll . . . tell you that!” Bundy remained unconvinced: “But what ‘most people’ Mr. President?” JFK shot back, “I think you’re gonna have it very difficult to explain [Kennedy often fractured grammar in tense moments] why we are going to take hostile military action in Cuba . . . when he’s saying, ‘If you get yours out of Turkey, I’ll get ours out of Cuba.’ I think you’ve got a very tough one here. Let’s not kid ourselves”—a remark he repeated three times. “I don’t see why we pick that track,” Bundy persisted, “when he’s offered us the other track in the last twenty-four hours.” JFK cut him off, “Well, he’s offered us a new one! . . . in fact, all these matters can be discussed if he’ll cease work [in Cuba].” Then the president paused dramatically for about six seconds before concluding bleakly, “And then where are we? . . . if that’s part of the record, then you don’t have a very good war.” “NATO may be firm now,” he warned, in language evocative of his letters home during World War II, but “we all know how quickly everybody’s courage goes when the blood starts to flow.”

    “I myself,” Bundy pronounced again, would send back word that they have to do better than this public statement . . . and get [Khrushchev] back to where he was last night. JFK recommended requesting an emergency Sunday meeting of the NATO council. “No,” Bundy countered, “I would not do it tomorrow, Mr. President, myself!” JFK ignored him, reiterating that “time is running out . . . . It’s got to be finessed. We have to finesse [Khrushchev].” The national security chief remained convinced that NATO would conclude that “we were trying to sell out our allies for our interests. It’s irrational, and it’s crazy, but it’s a terribly powerful fact.”

    The tapes confirm that Kennedy was convinced that the Soviet premier would not, and could not, return to his Friday proposal after moving on to a tougher public position on Saturday. RFK and special assistant Ted Sorensen urged the president to send a letter to persuade Khrushchev to return to the Friday proposal. Kennedy agreed to send it, but his indifferent tone suggests no confidence in that idea; he referred to the letter as “this thing.” JFK was certain that political pressure around the world would make it impossible for Khrushchev to swallow an offer he had abandoned.

    Some readers may be wondering about the so-called “Trollope Ploy”—a scheme designed to assist the administration in concealing the truth about the secret deal that ended the crisis. Thirteen Days credits RFK with the idea. JFK, however, phoned former presidents Eisenhower, Truman, and Hoover on Sunday and lied about the deal, insisting that he had pressured Khrushchev back to the Friday proposal. Ike was impressed: “this is a very conciliatory move he’s made”—the “Trollope Ploy” before it had a name.[4]

    Bundy’s memoir largely ignored his abrasive and officious exchanges with the president. That regrettable decision deprived historians and the public, before the tapes were available, of unique evidence and insight into the personal, emotional, and human realities of these discussions. (The possibility that Bundy acted as ExComm “devil’s advocate” is effectively belied by these taut, quarrelsome recorded clashes.)

    Bundy stood by the 1962 US line that “the crisis was brought on” by Khrushchev. “We have a list of sabotage options, Mr. President,” which included removing Castro. “I think it would need your approval . . . . Post-Castro Cuba, is the most complex landscape.” JFK concurred that Khrushchev had “initiated the danger . . . he’s the one playing God, not us.” These covert US schemes, kept secret from the American people, were no secret to the USSR and Cuba, and help explain Khrushchev’s gamble to protect Cuba with Soviet missiles.

    The international political appeal of Khrushchev’s Saturday message, Bundy reluctantly agreed, had negated the first proposal “Yet, in the end,” he concluded, “President Kennedy not only chose that [public] course but recognized the importance of giving it clear [public] priority over any effort to persuade the Turks” to accept a missile trade. In fact, this was a shrewd and devious half-truth. JFK never expected the ploy to succeed—a fact Bundy well understood. Yet the president used the Friday letter gambit (as he had done in the call to the former presidents) as a public cover story to conceal the behind-the-scenes Turkey-Cuba trade.

    Bundy was impressed by the contributions of Secretary of State Dean Rusk, who resisted the missile trade during the meetings, but also shared the president’s aversion to allowing “an intransigent position on these unwanted weapons stand between his country and the safe removal of Soviet missiles from Cuba . . . [which] was worth many times any possible cost.”
Bundy’s own judgment, a quarter century later, echoed both JFK and Rusk:

   Kennedy’s understanding of the political power of Khrushchev’s second letter made him pessimistic about the prospect of success in returning to the first . . . .  Twenty-five years have passed, and I find myself less impressed by my own insistence on the reality of NATO sentiment than I am by the president’s unwavering recognition that the basic interest of all concerned was to find a peaceful end to the crisis and that the Turkish missiles, whatever the opinions of allies, did not justify bloodshed in Cuba.[5]

 

Sheldon M. Stern was John F. Kennedy Library Historian from 1977-2000. He had the unique opportunity to hear and evaluate all the Cuban missile crisis recordings two decades before they were declassified. He is the author of Averting the Final Failure: JFK and the Secret Cuban Missile Crisis Meetings (2003);  The Week the World Stood Still: Inside the Secret Cuban Missile Crisis (2005); and The Cuban Missile Crisis in American Memory: Myths vs. Reality (2012).

 

[1] Sheldon M. Stern, “The Selective Memory of McGeorge Bundy,” in The Cuban Missile Crisis in American Memory, Myths vs. Reality (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2012), 119-128.

[2] McGeorge Bundy, Danger and Survival: Choices about the Bomb in the First Fifty Years (New York: Random House, 1988) 391.

[3] Sheldon M. Stern, “Beyond the Smoke and Mirrors: The Real JFK White House Cuban Missile Crisis,” in Len Scott and R. Gerald Hughes, eds., The Cuban Missile Crisis: A Critical Reappraisal (Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2015) 204-224.

[4] Stern, “The Trollope Ploy Myth,” Cuban Missile Crisis in American Memory, 134-147.

[5] Bundy, Danger and Survival, 430, 436.

©2024 by Sheldon M. Stern

Unwarranted Claims and False News in The New York Times

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By Barton J. Bernstein

 

 

    After we had been advised that the nation first [having the A-bomb] would be able to terminate the war at once . . . , I was convinced that we should proceed with all possible speed to develop and use the all powerful weapon. . . I was confident that the [secret] securing of the funds . . . would not present a difficult problem.

                               Senator Elmer Thomas (D-Oklahoma)[1]

 

    In January 2024, a Washington-based New York Times reporter, Catie Edmondson, landed a journalistic plum: a “Reporter’s Notebook” article on the front-page of the newspaper, complete with a two-page spread inside the paper, with illustrations. She presented the story as a pioneering article that allegedly uncovered a hitherto unknown, or little known, secret: precisely how the US government funded the atomic bomb during World War 2. The Times underscored the seeming importance of the article by featuring, above the fold, a picture of physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, the wartime director of Los Alamos and “father of the A-bomb,” along with Army General Leslie R. Groves, director of the Manhattan Project. Other photos inside further emphasized what the editors apparently deemed as her article’s significance.[2]

    A 2018 Barnard graduate, and former editor-in-chief of the Columbia University Daily Spectator, Edmondson has been with the Times for almost six years. She has covered congressional matters since 2018, although in 2023 she also wrote some articles about Germany. Edmondson, who started at the Times on a James Reston Reporting Fellowship, could fairly be described as a rising star at the newspaper.

    Her “Reporter’s Notebook” article was ostensibly about history, but also concerned an issue of great continuing import. That secret wartime funding may reasonably be considered the precedent for postwar “black budget” financing in various parts of the US military and intelligence budgets. It is a subject that, despite many publications over the years, still invites more research, and more analysis.[3]

    Edmondson, by her own admission, was initially ignorant about secret wartime A-bomb funding, and it may well be commendable that she sought to learn about it. Given that hers was not just another article, but prominently displayed on the newspaper of record’s front page, it is important to understand how she went about researching the matter, what she learned, and what, if anything, she contributed to general knowledge.

    Lamentably, Edmondson’s self-celebrated research did not advance understanding of the subject in any significant way. She discovered and reported what has mostly been long known, though she did not present it as such. At the same time, she made a number of errors, and ignored or omitted much important information and context. Notably, she failed to consult many monographs, memoirs, and biographies published in the last several decades covering the events she claimed to examine afresh, and thus displayed an ignorance of the extensive scholarship by historians deeply familiar with the archival records. Ultimately, the prominence of her article, juxtaposed with its significant faults, constitutes a troubling failure in meeting the standards of journalistic responsibility. The Times ill-served its readers.

    Had Edmondson’s subject been obscure history, her article, with all its faults, might not warrant sustained attention. But since it concerns a subject of continuing importance, and because the article seems to have served as a springboard to an increasingly frequent and prominent role for Edmondson at the newspaper of record, it would seem the article deserves critical discussion and analysis. This is particularly true, moreover, since the Times has not deigned to issue even modest corrections or disclaimers. The Times’s response to public and private criticisms that have been leveled so far has basically been a non-response. The Times, put simply, has stonewalled.[4]

Boosterism and the Article

    Edmondson’s enthusiastic, and apparently self-pleased, 19 January article was soon followed by a Times podcast, conducted by Sabrina Tavernise. The podcast consisted of a friendly interview with Edmondson about her research and findings, which were admiringly and uncritically treated as important and revealing, almost a celebration of her resourcefulness, prowess, and seeming discoveries. Reference to the podcast appeared on page 2 of the print edition (“Inside the Times: The Story Behind the Story”), and was entitled, “Once the Credits Roll, Reporting Begins.” In sum, Edmondson’s article received about as much play and attention as the Times can lavish on an article nowadays, short of nominating it for a Pulitzer Prize.

    Instead of being handled with such self-regard, Edmondson’s article should have been fact-checked, and then modestly presented, and explicitly treated, as a useful but severely limited, and rather selective, summary of what had been largely known for more than a half century about the secret A-bomb financing, with some candid acknowledgment of what, though very limited, was added and thus new. Admittedly, to place in the Times a restatement, at some length, of essentially known matters might be useful to many readers, but that should have been stated up front in the article and the podcast. The implication in both was very different: Edmondson’s report, and findings, were portrayed as startling, revealing, and remarkably new.

Before Hiroshima & Nagasaki

 

The First Atomic Bomb: The Trinity Site in New Mexico
Janet Farrell Brodie
University of Nebraska Press. 318 pp. $60

By Kay Matthews

 

    The First Atomic Bomb is a deeply researched history of the weapon developed by the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) and tested at the Trinity site in the Tularosa Basin on 16 July 1945. Dubbed “the gadget” by the scientists and workers who manufactured it during the last years of World War II, it was identical to the second bomb dropped on Japan—aka “Fat Man,” a plutonium implosion bomb detonated over Nagasaki on 9 August 1945. Three days earlier, “Little Boy,” a Uranium-235 fission bomb, had exploded over Hiroshima.

    The book begins with an overview of the policies, people, and places that contributed to the Trinity explosion and its complicated aftermath, which is helpful for readers unfamiliar with the history of the bomb. The Manhattan Project, a thirty-five month endeavor that cost of enormous cost (estimated at $21.6 billion in 1996 dollars), brought together the scientists, most famously Robert Oppenheimer, and the military, General Leslie Groves, but also an “industrial and engineering construction effort” of thousands of workers—civilian and military—all over the country that somehow managed to maintain a curtain of secrecy until the bombs were dropped over Japan.

    Brodie’s focus on the workers—not scientists—who helped make “the gadget,” and her knowledge of previous scholarship familiar to many New Mexicans, are impressive. In Chapter Two, “Dispossessions,” she details the stories of Tularosa Basin residents who were forced to relocate after the Trinity site was chosen for the bomb test, mostly Anglo and Hispano ranchers. They were inadequately compensated and never allowed to return post-Trinity for complex of reasons, including the expansion of the nearby Alamogordo Army Base (which became Holloman Air Force Base), and the White Sands Proving Ground (which became White Sands Missile Range).

    To put this in context, Brodie devotes a subsection of the chapter to the history of land conflict in New Mexico and references the work of writers who have documented the displacement of both Native American and Hispano populations in the long history of the territory’s journey towards statehood. Historian Malcolm Ebright’s book, Advocates for the Oppressed, documents the confrontations between wealthy Hispano families and Natives over control of valuable irrigable land. Historian Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz’s book, Roots of Resistance, provides an analysis of how a succession of conflicting land tenure patterns and practices dispossessed and disenfranchised the indigenous people of New Mexico. Historian David Caffey documents the inability of the United States legal system to justly adjudicate Hispano and Native land grants.

    While Brodie provides a detailed description of the day of the Trinity test in this first section, the bulk of the book is divided into two main sections: 1) building of the site; and 2) post-test events regarding disposition of the site, the afterlife of Trinity radiation, and historical preservation.

Choosing the Site

    Then Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes instructed General Groves that no Native American tribes or reservations should be displaced in choosing the site. Yet many Hispano and Anglo farmers and ranchers would be forced to leave, as noted above. In choosing the uppermost portion of the infamous Jornada del Muerto (Dead Man’s Journey) basin, part of the Camino Real trail from Las Cruces to Socorro, they figured they had secured as much isolation and secrecy as possible. The workers who came to build the site from Los Alamos and the army—military police, construction workers, engineers (SEDs), technicians, and the scientists in charge—worked under brutal wind and heat conditions. Brodie notes that despite an integrated work force at LANL—Native Americans and Hispanos—there are no records that reveal how many people of color worked at the Trinity site (ditto for women).

    After the successful explosion, technicians and workers stayed at the site to clean up and conduct additional experimentation while the military provided security. They all wore radiation-detecting dosimeter badges, but as Brodie jumps back and forth in time over the post-explosion years, the haphazard nature of the cleanup and status of the site becomes obvious.

    A telling example is that of the handling of the trinitite, or the “semi-glossy agglomerations” from sand thrown into the air by the blast that fell to the ground around the site (and that people took home as souvenirs). There was little agreement about its radioactivity, whether it should be removed, or be preserved as part of White Sands National Monument, until finally the Atomic Energy Commission, which took civilian control of the Trinity site, hired a contractor to scoop it up and bury it. No records of that removal were kept, however, and confusion remained as to where and how it was buried. Brodie attributes the general lack of records on post-Trinity activities to the pressures to ready the bombs for use in Japan.

    Post-bomb control over the Trinity site was complicated by its location within the Alamogordo Army Base and the rapidly expanding White Sands Proving Ground. In the build up to World War II and especially post war, New Mexico became the outdoor laboratory for more than nuclear weapons. Public lands were withdrawn for bombing ranges, fighter pilot practice, and missile testing. Competing requests from the US army, air force, and navy expanded the military presence in New Mexico, which now hosts four massive military bases ranging from 50,000 acres to 3,200 square miles.

    Brodie devotes a chapter to the radioactive fallout from Trinity, something New Mexicans are all too familiar with as a “nuclear sacrifice zone”: Los Alamos National Laboratory; the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP); uranium mining and milling (impacting Native pueblos); and a proposed temporary nuclear reactor waste storage facility. LANL workers and miners were finally compensated under the Energy Employees Occupational Illness Compensation Program and Radiation Exposure Compensation Act (RECA) of 1990. But compensation for nuclear test “downwinders” was limited to those residents of Utah, Nevada, and Arizona—not New Mexico Trinity site downwinders. In research at the National Archives Brodie found that two items from a folder labeled “Secret: Classified Information. National Security Information” had been pulled from the file but their labels remained, addressing “Disposition of Alamogordo Test Area” and “Disposition of Holloman.” Both documents were pulled in the 1990s, just as the RECA act was promulgated. Brodie questions whether this information was censored to prevent the likelihood that the Trinity downwinders would be included in RECA.

    Amendments to RECA law over the past few years have added eligibility to additional geographical areas but despite the intense lobbying of the Tularosa Basin Downwinders Consortium, the act continues to exclude them (the act includes only those government employees who were present at and after the explosion). Brodie ends this chapter with another reference to a work of New Mexico scholarship, Understories: The Political Life of Forests in Northern New Mexico by Jake Kosek. He found that many New Mexicans suspect, rightly or wrongly, that scientists who collected data about Trinity radiation were also responsible for hundreds of cattle mutilations in the 1970s and 1980s, using the soft tissue to test radiation levels!

    Just as complicated as military control over the site was the National Park Service’s (NPS) attempt to preserve the Trinity site as a national monument. The fact that the White Sands National Monument, a magnificent desert field of gypsum dunes was already wedged between the Alamogordo Air Base and White Sands Proving Ground may have contributed to the enthusiasm. The monument superintendent, Johnwill Faris was disabused of his hope that it could coexist with the military when the air base took over the monument’s water supply and condemned surroundings lands (Johnwill Faris’s son lives in Santa Fe and corrected Brodie’s spelling of his father’s name: Johnwill, not Johnwell). But the monument survived and is now a National Park. No such luck for a Trinity National Monument.

    Brodie quotes a NPS bureaucrat: “I believe that this country should not establish a national monument to commemorate a bomb—any more than we would want to commemorate the use of poison gas.” After much squabbling and the advent of new federal rules that affected NPS designations, the Trinity site was listed as a National Historic Landmark in the Federal Resister of Historic Places on 15 March 1972.

    Kudos to a writer who, despite a few minor mistakes on place and people names, wrote a book that is meticulously researched and sensitive to the people of New Mexico, whose lives have been forever impacted by the nuclear weapons industry since that fateful day in 1945.

Kay Matthews lives on a farm in El Valle, New Mexico and works as a freelance journalist and publisher of La Jicarita, an online journal of environmental politics. An earlier version of this review appeared in La Jicarita in July.

©2023 by Kay Matthews

Christopher Nolan’s Forthcoming “Oppenheimer” Movie: A Historian's Questions, Worries, and Challenges

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By Barton J. Bernstein

 

I think we should not attempt a plan [to develop the weapon for radiological warfare] unless we can poison [enough] food to kill a half a million men.
                   J. Robert Oppenheimer to Enrico Fermi, 25 May 1943[1]

I can hardly believe my eyes when I saw a news release said to be quoting Oppenheimer, and giving the impression that there is no radiological hazard [in the A-bombed Japanese cities]. Apparently all things are relative.
                   Radiologist Dr. Robert S. Stone to Lieutenant Colonel Hymer L. Friedel[l], 9 August 1945[2]

[C]redible evidence exists which tends to show that Dr. Oppenheimer was a member of the Communist Party [in 1941] . . . This evidence [because of the source employed] is not available for use in court.
                    Assistant Attorney General Charles B. Murray to Attorney General James P. McGranery, 12 November 1952[3]

Dr. J. Robert Oppenheimer said [in his speech] that he has ‘no doubts’ [that the US‘s] development of the H-bomb was the right course.[4]
                    Palo Alto Times, April 1960

The people who know nothing [about Oppenheimer] are going to get the wildest ride [in the “Oppenheimer” film]. . . they need to know, because, you know, he’s the most important man who ever lived.
                    Christopher Nolan[5]

 

    The forthcoming “Oppenheimer” film, on the once- famous J. Robert Oppenheimer, reportedly received a large budget for the 2023 movie—about $100 million for the making, and about $100 million for the marketing. Directed by Christopher Nolan, whose earlier films have reportedly grossed more than $5 billion, the movie is likely to be a blockbuster.

    Rather ironically, it is likely to rival the “Barbie” film at the box office. Some critics, undoubtedly, will discuss American culture in the framework suggested by the two very different movies. “Barbie” has multiple, and profitable, product tie-ins with various items and firms. Such could not reasonably be the case for the “Oppenheimer” film, dealing heavily, as it does, with nuclear weapons.

    A widely admired director, Christopher Nolan has won laurels for his work, and his movies are often used as models in film-making classes. His “Oppenheimer” film was voted by a Hollywood critics group as among the most awaited summer movies. It is scheduled for release on July 21. It has already been discussed in various publications, and the publicity blitz may be near. The “Oppenheimer” film is apparently in many ways a joint project by Nolan with his wife, Emma Thomas, who served as the producer. “She’s the best producer in Hollywood, without question,” according to Nolan.[6]

    Nolan’s new movie is starring the gifted Irish actor, Cillian Murphy, as physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, who was often described, and greatly celebrated, as “the father of the atomic bomb.” The cast includes, among others, Matt Damon as General Leslie Groves, head of the A-bomb project, Robert Downey, Jr. as Lewis Strauss, an Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) chief and Oppenheimer foe, and Emily Blunt, as Kitty (Katherine) Oppenheimer, Robert’s wife. It is a distinguished cast.

    It’s revealing to read in some newspapers, as part of the Hollywood-generated publicity, of the committed preparation by the hard-working Cillian Murphy for his central role in “Oppenheimer.” Murphy stated, as the New York Times reported in Murphy’s words, “We are going into this guy’s [Oppenheimer’s] head, you have to be immersed in the essence so strongly that you carry the audience with you.”[7]

    The movie reportedly leans heavily on a major and justifiably well-respected, but sometimes also dismayingly flawed, book on the theoretical physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, who had directed the wartime and early postwar Los Alamos laboratory, later headed the AEC’s General Advisory Committee (GAC), and became in 1947 the longtime director of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton.[8]

    After Oppenheimer’s impressive wartime work directing the secret Los Alamos laboratory in developing the two kinds of atomic bombs, he became, in the postwar period for a near-decade, an influential adviser on the US’s nuclear-weapons and related defense policy. Aside from the iconic Albert Einstein, Oppenheimer was probably the best known, and generally the most respected, US-based scientist.